Eclipse Fever hit North America by 8-bit force!
Throughout all the traffic and cardboard box pinholes, many great photos have been published across the internet. None however, quite capture the beauty of astronomy aesthetics like an eclipse with a photo with a Gameboy Camera. Put on your ISO 12312-2 approved solar filtered glasses and marvel at Reddit users zhx’s photography, capturing the moment through the eyes of a Gameboy Camera.
First off, just like any Photography discussion, we must talk kit. Even if it’s just cosmetic recasing and not really important to the topic at hand, that’s just what we do here. For this outdoor adventure, zhx used the original DMG (Dot Matrix Game) Gameboy release which was re-shelled at one point (possibly due to wear and tear from gaming years of gaming, or other photography sessions in nature) with a custom case and buttons from Gameboy Parts and Mods Supplier Kitsch-Bent. Can’t forget about the Gameboy Camera either, which was released in several different colors to match the Gameboy “Play it Loud” line, wherein this Camera is the yellow one.
Now the fun complicated part. How to get the file off of the Gameboy camera and onto a computer to post? Not easily, of course, as you would expect trying to get files off of early 1990s tech. The procedure, as per zhx:
“Pretty convoluted process. I shot it on my backlit DMG, then I use the Interact Mega Memory card on my Pocket (the camera doesn’t fit in the DMG with the Mega Memory) and back the SAV file up to the Mega Memory. Then I plug my USB 64M cart into the MM and restore the file to that, which I can then plug into my computer and retrieve (I use EMS-Qart for that part). Then I can open the SAV file in either GBCamera Dump or this site which provides a pretty drag-and-drop front end for this task. I then typically enlarge the BMPs in Photoshop and export to PNG.” -zhx
One could say it’s an interesting exposure and a e s t h e t i c to modern photography with a different take to a minimalist perspective, but we’re sure zhx just thought it would be cool to take a picture of the eclipse with his Gameboy Camera. For more information, you can look at his Reddit Post and another writeup on Hackaday.